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The rest of the words, she had forgotten, but she reviewed the information, recollecting it in a warm emotional glow. He had said that every maintenance ship required three pilots, but the League had discovered that vital to maintaining psychological well-being among colonists was the presence of a friendly face; the usual earthy star jockeys responsible for such grunt missions didn’t suffice. This prompted the League to include with maintenance missions a warm and empathetic person who could help meet the colonists’ psychological needs. He was to be their link to the home planet and largely speaking, society and civilization. The position was officially titled “Colony Interface Representative”, but unofficially he was known as the High-Touch Guy, or HTG, for short; on the maintenance run to the Sirius colonies, Daniel Weatherby was the HTG.
She left Lloyd to his dreams and stepped back into the corridor. Her mind floated free in a kind of gauzily happy feeling, but one unsteady — as if she were walking over thin ice. Now that Jeffrey was gone, somehow, her room with her reassuring books felt miles away. The corridor curved around slightly in both directions, and to her left, just where the two walls seemed to meet, lurked the entrance to the observatory. She couldn’t see it from where she stood, standing in the doorway, but she could feel it pulling her as if with barbed threads. “No,” she said to herself, a slight shiver in her fingers, “not yet.” She would remember them, and justly, but not quite yet.
Back in the Comm room, a long bell resounded and the room lit up with two lights across the top of the VR unit. Its synthesized voice repeated, “Diane is calling.”
Sarah scrambled back to the room and waited as Diane shimmered into existence. To her, Diane was like the grandmother that she never had. Diane had a kind face, wrinkled with laugh lines, bright blue eyes, and long silver hair that trailed through a simple wooden hair clasp. She sat in a wheelchair that Sarah long ago had stopped noticing.
Their conversations always began the same way, and Sarah was glad for that reassuring, rhythmic midwestern dialect. “Hello, Sarah.”
“Hi, Diane. You’re early!”
“I just thought I’d check in on you.” Sarah smiled without meaning it.
“Thanks,” she said.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m doing pretty well,” she said. “Almost everyone’s called me and I wrote a lot earlier.”
“That’s good. About today?”
“Mostly. Some poetry. You never know what’s coming out when you sit down to write.”
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